iCab Mobile (Web Browser‪)‬ 16+

iOS 12.3 seems to have broken the URL / search input field. When text is entered to attempt to do a Google (or whatever) search, or when entering a URL, instead the current page is searched like a “find” command. A failed “search in page” message box pops up in either case which leaves you and the browser dead in the water. You can still select from your bookmarks but that’s about it. Can’t type in anything new, unless you manually add a bookmark for a search engine or something else. I have not been able to fix this by changing anything in settings, not even “combined URL+Search Field”. This is a real show stopper with the 12.3 update.

The other problem I have always had is that on older style textual “bulletin board” type forums that involve lots of hyperlinks up and down the page, iCab usually doesn’t
“Go to” the right place when you click a link; in other words it goes to the wrong message which is a bit annoying. It sometimes returns to a previously visited link and in other cases seems to go some fixed percentage of the way up or down the page. So I have to do a whole bunch of manual scrolling to get to the right place and this is constantly!

Even given the above, iCab is still pretty much the only browser I’ll use on iOS (but the URL field problem has to be fixed pronto!)

I’m not a Mac user, but I’ve had an iPhone since the 2nd version. I’ve tried many browsers to deal with Safari’s issues and lack of features, and I never gave this shot. Apparently it’s been around since the early days. Probably as long as the App Store has been serving up irrelevant results. That’s another issue though.
I was looking for a way to keep pages from reloading while I was reading them and found a forum post recommending this. The user seemed very knowledgeable and actually said it was his default for several years. That’s when I looked at the date and realized the post was nearly 12 years old and the answer was a repost even older!
I checked it out anyway and as always in the App Store- I sorted reviews my positive, critical and recent to get a picture of the current state of things. I looked at the version history to make sure it’s actively supported. And I looked for subscription requirements. I was happy to see this developer still earning praise for good work after all this time. My guess is this tool is used and developed for personal use as well.
After installing, I immediately noticed many more features than are in the listing.
I’m very excited to see how this works out!

This was my go-to web browsing app for private browsing. The user experience was awesome. The tabs worked well. And most importantly, when I switched to another app, it would hide whatever I had on screen. With the “privacy” features fully enabled, it would completely clear my history, cache, and any open web pages for ultimate privacy. But all of that is now broken. It doesn’t work at all… there is no privacy, and these key features no longer work. They should work, but they just don’t. And, the new version has several UI changes that make it much harder to use. For example, tabs are smaller now, so tapping on them is difficult. Tap-and-hold on a link, so that I can open it in a background tab, only works some times now. And trying to get a video to play (one that you have to tap on to start playing), doesn’t work most of the time either. Scrolling the playback marker in a video, by tapping and scrubbing the place in the horizontal scroll bar doesn’t scrub the video any more. Instead, it is being interpreted as a screen swipe, which causes the window to move, or to switch to another tab (which I had to disable), or to simulate pressing the back button. All in all, this version is unusable.